Before you invest in a headless CMS

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. Before you spend anything on a headless CMS, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Separating content from presentation lets you redesign without remigrating
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Common failure modes

Editors get a proper interface instead of raw markup. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Same content can feed a site, an app, and a screen. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

What this looks like day to day

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Three things worth confirming about a headless CMS before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Editors get a proper interface instead of raw markup — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.